AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Aug 30, 2021 9:14 pm
Right, that is not really the point. I will have to follow up later, but it should be understood as a phenomenology of Thinking which shows how we can begin accessing the realm of the noumenon by way of that spiritual activity, and only by coming to know the noumenal relations we begin on a path to spritual freedom.
Hedge,
So what you write above is definitely an implication of Steiner's philosophy, but also of many other thinkers in the 20th century. If that was the sum total of his insight, I would just say read Jung instead. But his philosophy is much more profound than that and points to insights into the structure of Reality no prior or future philosophers have had. I would really call it the most original and comprehensive philosophy ever put in writing, save for maybe the exception of Plato (but Steiner lays out his vision and insight in far fewer words). The key is to recognize he is calling attention to our living experience of Thinking activity. There are no prior assumptions made about what that activity is or how it "should" behave according to natural laws, psychological principles, etc. So, again, that in itself makes it a phenomenology which has never been attempted before or since. Since Cleric has explained PoF many times in various ways before, which surely surpass anything I can write as a summary right now, I will just quote one of those for you:
Cleric wrote:Let's step back and consider what is really given in the riddle of existence. What is given is perceptions - colors, sounds, feelings, etc. Where is the 'real' world of which the perceptions are only representations? Where do we find it in the given? Simple - there's isn't such a thing. The idea the there should exist an inaccessible world behind the perceptions is something that we add through our thinking (quite unconsciously for most) on top of the given. This is something so simple and yet something so deep that people simply look at it and can't believe that it's a matter of deeply ingrained preconceived idea that completely shapes their feel for reality.
It is true that perceptions meet us as a mystery. We don't understand why and how they appear and disappear from the field of our consciousness. But does this require of itself that the explanations for the perceptions exist in some impenetrable world on the 'other side' of our consciousness? Not really. Such an idea can never be the result of something that we know directly from the given. Why? Because we by definition say that the 'other side' of reality can never be known directly from 'our side'. If we were to know the reality of the 'other side' through some perception this would mean that it is accessible from 'our side' and this defeats the whole purpose of the split. Actually the idea for the 'other side' of our consciousness is the most abstract idea we can conjure up. It's so abstract that it can never be confirmed through anything that we can ever perceive. It exists only as long as we support it by belief.
So the fact that we don't understand why perceptions act and move like they do doesn't require out of itself that the causes for these perceptions lie behind some impenetrable boundary (for example God's mind in contrast to our mind). The only certain thing in the given is that we experience perceptions. That's all. Any hypothesizing about the source of the perceptions is already added through thinking. In PoF we realize that there's at least one thing in the World Content where the ideal is united with the perceptual and that's thinking. Imagine what would it be if you experienced verbal thoughts only as auditory perception without any meaning. They would be the same as any other external auditory perception of unknown language. Thoughts are what they are only because we have their perceptions in unity with ideas. Thinking is where the world of perceptions is united with the world of ideas. This already gives the essential nature of what any quest for knowledge is (check Steiner's quote in Ashvin's post here). In other words, our thirst for knowledge is satisfied only when we reveal through our spiritual activity (whether thinking or higher forms of cognition) the missing ideal element that complements perceptions and reveals their complete reality. This is for example what Goethe did, admittedly still in an instinctive way, with his archetypal plant. When he contemplated the plant his soul was not satisfied only with the sensory perceptions and the most immediate patterns of growth recognizable by the intellect. He was looking at the plant only as a momentary form in the process of metamorphosis, by experiencing the whole process as the living and mobile idea of the archetypal plant. When we speak we use sentences. Every isolated word is understood properly only if it is taken as a part of the idea of the whole sentence. In a similar way Goethe experienced how the archetypal plant idea extending in time is responsible for the plant's metamorphosis, in the same way that our thinking ideas are responsible for the temporal sequence of verbal words of the sentence. Through this Goethe was already exploring in instinctive manner what today we call Imaginative consciousness.
We shouldn't confuse limitations of our perceptions and cognitive abilities with self-imposed hard boundaries to what can and can't be known. For example, in the moment I'm in my room. My perceptions are limited to the interior. But if I exercise my will and step outside, different perceptions will be presented to me. It's similar with cognition. If I look at text written in unknown to me language or if I'm staring at math problem that I can't solve, this speaks only for my own current limitations. But it'll be foolish (and quite arrogant) to declare that just because I don't understand the text or I can't solve the problem, or I'm too lazy to step outside, it follows that it is in principle impossible to do so.
